Israeli government and military officials on Wednesday tried to shift the blame to each other for a devastating one-tonne bomb dropped on a Gaza neighbourhood that killed a Hamas military commander and 10 children.
The internal debate on Israel’s strategy of assassinating Palestinian militants raged as rescue workers in Gaza pulled the body of a four-year-old boy from the ruins, the 16th victim — and 10th child — killed in the attack on the Hamas militant, Sheikh Salah Shehada.
Much of the discussion focused on charges by Israel’s political establishment of faulty military intelligence.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told Israel’s largest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, that he would not have authorised the assassination had he known that 14 other Palestinians would be killed.
His comment called into question Israel’s claim to be conducting a ”pinpoint policy of prevention” against militants.
”Sharon said he was told only two of Shehada’s aides were with Shehada at the time, both of them Hamas operatives,” wrote the commentator, Nahum Barnea, who spent Tuesday evening with Sharon.
”We shall investigate very clearly what went wrong,” Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told the BBC. ”What happened is really regrettable. It wasn’t done intentionally.”
But the explanations and apologies did not carry much weight with Israeli critics and were further undermined by statements from military sources that Sharon was aware that Shehada’s wife and young daughter would be in the building.
The sources also told Israeli newspapers on Wednesday that Sharon and Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer were briefed on the dangers of dropping a one-tonne bomb on a teeming area of Gaza City. Eleven of the dead lived in houses adjacent to the target of the assassination.
”The central error was that we used weaponry that anyone involved in the decision-making process should have known could harm innocent people living in the area,” the Labour Party’s Haim Ramon told Israel Radio.
The efforts of the Israeli political establishment to distance themselves from the attack stood in stark contrast to Sharon’s statement on Tuesday — after the high death toll was known — that the assassination of Shehada was ”one of our biggest successes”. Other officials accused Shehada of using his neighbours as human shields.
In the intervening hours, Washington and other countries condemned the strike, a theme picked up by Israeli newspapers, which called the attack ”Gaza’s bombing disaster”. — Â